The Manga Was Right About This Place

Three things hit me the moment I stepped off the plane, twenty years old, eight thousand kilometres from home for the first time: a wall of humid heat carrying a smell nothing like France, the almost tropical green of the vegetation, and the tiny kei-cars, built for the narrow streets typical of Japanese roads.

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Arriving in Japan, the universe I'd discovered through manga folded almost perfectly over my own imagination — matching, oddly, the idea I'd already built of the place, the way a shirt clings to skin in that kind of heat. And that familiarity never really faded as I kept discovering more of this surprising country.

The Mystery of Tintin

Astérix isn't really France. Lucky Luke isn't really America, or at least not all of it. Fiction borrows a place and reshapes it for the story's own purposes.

Maybe that's the implicit contract between a Franco-Belgian comic and its reader: a stylised world, only slightly removed from the real one. That contract doesn't really exist in manga the same way. Whether the world is purely fictional or fully realistic, this Japanese inspiration almost always shows through — sometimes as a wink, sometimes plainly.

Which still leaves a question: why did I, like so many others, want to see this particular Japan so badly — when almost nobody flies to France hoping to find Tintin?

What sets manga apart from the Franco-Belgian tradition is the time spent with its characters. A Tintin album is a closed adventure, finished in an afternoon; Tintin himself barely changes between the first page and the last. A manga runs for twenty volumes, sometimes a hundred, following the same characters as they grow and change. That's not a story you visit. That's a relationship you keep for years.

* To be fair, some more recent French-Belgian comics borrowing from manga's style do let their characters grow and learn — Lanfeust de Troy comes to mind. But even there, the world the character moves through usually remains the backbone of the story, where manga almost always flips that priority.

What Every Genre Has in Common

Take the robots — Doraemon, Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita), Gundam, Astro Boy — which have almost nothing to do with detective stories like Detective Conan. But what these stories share is that the character's personality drives the story, more often than the adventure itself.

What makes One Piece work isn't really the treasure hunt. It's Luffy, and the people he gathers around him. It's wanting to know what happens to them, not just what happens next.

Shōnen, Shōjo, and the Question of Growth

This idea of growth is close to the heart of it. As I touched on in The Sword and the Tea Whisk, our essay on tea and Musashi's way of the sword, Japan has a real fondness for perfectionism as a lifelong pursuit — and adventure, in this framing, is mostly a mechanism for growing up. That's at least a very shōnen way of telling a story, and it isn't universal across manga.

Shōjo manga can be more contemplative, and some series favour plot over a hero's psychology or growth, even if that growth still matters (Doraemon, Detective Conan).

Nana is one example: not without its own struggles, but slower, more introspective, less interested in the next fight than in the next feeling. Two personal favourites worth a look, for different reasons: Love Hina (pure shōnen romantic comedy, and no less loved for it) and Honey and Clover (technically josei, aimed at young women, rather than shōjo — but every bit as introspective).

The heroes are rarely flawless, and sometimes flatly infuriating (see Shinji in Evangelion ;)) — but that's exactly what lets you see yourself in them. Or, depending on the character, cheerfully despise them instead.

Where the Word Comes From

Manga, written 漫画, combines two characters: man (漫), meaning whimsical or unconstrained, and ga (画), meaning picture. Put together: something close to "unruly pictures" — sketches with a mind of their own.

The word entered wide use through Hokusai's own Hokusai Manga, published in fifteen volumes between 1814 and 1878 — the final volumes appearing decades after Hokusai's own death in 1849 — though, as historians note, those were compilations of unconnected sketches, not the sequential storytelling we'd recognise today. The narrative, serialised sense of the word took hold decades later, largely through Rakuten Kitazawa's newspaper column Jiji Manga, launched in 1902. The genre exploded into what we know now mostly after the Second World War, with Osamu Tezuka — the creator of Astro Boy — widely credited as its most influential architect.

So the word itself has been quietly shifting meaning for over two hundred years, long before it ever meant "Japanese comic book" to the rest of the world.

The Impossible Dream of Becoming a Mangaka

What almost never makes it into the conversation is how brutal the profession itself is. Behind every hit series are dozens of titles nobody outside Japan will ever hear of, in a market so saturated with genres and rival titles that breaking through is closer to a lottery than a career path.

Bakuman, written by Death Note's Tsugumi Ohba and drawn by Takeshi Obata — the same artist behind Hikaru no Go, one of the four stories our guide is built around — follows two teenagers trying to make it as mangaka, and does more than almost anything else to demystify what that actually takes: the deadlines, the rejections, the sheer number of ways to fail before anyone succeeds.

A Disposable Art, Read Like a Newspaper

In Japan, weekly and monthly manga magazines — thick, cheap, printed on newsprint — are genuinely disposable: read on the train, then often left behind. But the chapters live on in tankōbon, the collected paperback volumes readers actually buy afterwards, keep, and eventually resell. That second-hand market is enormous, and it's why shops like Book Off are stacked floor to ceiling with tankōbon in near-perfect condition: entire completed series, sold for a fraction of retail.

After all these years, I still don't know exactly what explains something as creatively contagious as manga. But one thing's certain: this cultural pillar still has good days ahead of it.

Takeshi Obata, Bakuman's artist, also happens to be the artist behind Hikaru no Go — the manga that got me into Go in the first place, a story told in 10¹⁷⁰ Possibilities, One Path.